Ibrahim Khazzaka

Proximity, Attribution, and Power I. Introduction: The Ceramic Thread In the collections of V&A, Chinese porcelain sits beside what started as European wanna bes only for them to become artifacts of high skill in their own right - Meissen, Sèvres, Wedgwood - each piece a material record of desire and technical prowess, tainted with extraction. European pieces are often labeled with the name of the manufact urer , sometimes also a designer, and occasionally the chemist who

Essential Resources for Culture Bearers and Truth-Tellers. This comprehensive manual, published by PEN America in January 2021, serves as an essential complement to the work I've been documenting, offering practical frameworks for artists, writers, and cultural practitioners who find themselves targeted for their creative expression. The ARC Safety Guide emerges from a stark reality: in 2019 alone, over 700 incidents of artistic freedom violations were documented across at le

A Framework for Understanding Fragmentation, Lost Futures, and Locked Imaginations Part III: When Art Forgets to Build A feeling has followed me through every art gallery, and it's taken me years to understand that what I was encountering wasn't failure but strategy, wasn't accident but deliberate choice, wasn't one artist's limitation but an entire mode of cultural production that had decided, for reasons that made historical sense even if they led to a dead end, that meani

A Framework for Understanding Fragmentation, Lost Futures, and Locked Imaginations Part I: The Iconoclasm and Its Weapon It's 11:47 PM and i am doing it again, my phone glowing blue in the dark like a lifeline to everywhere and nowhere at once, and the first thing i see is a video of Gaza, rubble, a child's kissing the hand of a diceased grown up, and I swipe, now it's an academic thread about decolonial theory that i started reading three days ago and will never finish on my

Cultural Production, Temporal Displacement, and the Ethics of Documentation in Post-Crisis Societies Nostalgia, extraction, and care work in Lebanon

I invite you to trace with me a geography of displacement, where every border crossed became a threshold between holding and releasing. This is more than a story of movement; it is an investigation of the self, excavated through the objects I chose to carry and those I dared to abandon. It is a chronicle of the eternal negotiation between the responsibility of memory and the liberation of letting go. A Cartography of Becoming Since leaving Lebanon in 2012, my life has unfolde

"The American dream is the dream that our children will have it better than we did." - Terry Real

Introduction: The Gate as Threshold and Trial To be a Lebanese ceramic artist in an American MFA program is to stand perpetually at a threshold—what I named “The Gate of Dawn.” This was more than a metaphor; it was my lived condition: a site of arrival and uncertainty, hope and exhaustion, longing and duty. At this gate, I encountered my archetypes' duality. The Lovers yearned for communion, creative intimacy, and sacred recognition. The Servants shouldered heavy expectati

The Lebanese cultural landscape is a paradox of vibrant energy and profound stasis. It is a place where dazzling creativity coexists with a pervasive sense of being trapped, of an artistic conversation perpetually circling back to the same themes, forms, and unresolved tensions. As a Lebanese artist working from the United States, I live this paradox daily. To understand this condition—to explain why our aesthetics often feel "stuck in time"—I have had to embark on a multi-la

As an immigrant gay man, it was a process to find my own path in this city… to explore my sexuality and to embrace who I was in a place that sometimes doesn’t have boundaries or allow you to… be whoever you want to be.”